These Words

As teachers and students, we delude ourselves with abstraction. How many of us, instead of teaching the words of the Bible, offer a cheap summary or moral extraction to get at (what we call) the gist of the story? How often have you heard someone talk and talk and talk about God for hours without following the storyline of Scripture, in English, let alone the original languages? How often? The King James Bible contains 783,137 words. There is no gist. There are only “these words.”

“Everyone,” Jesus explains, “who hears these words of mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.” (Matthew 7:26)